14,000 DRM-Free Project MUSE Ebooks To Go Live in January

Johns Hopkins University Press’s Project MUSE recently announced details about its new ebook collections, including more than 14,000 titles from 66 university presses and scholarly publishers, which are available to order now but won’t be made accessible until January 1, 2012.

The titles are available exclusively as part of 26 separate collections, by subject or by publication year; titles will not be sold individually. Each ebook will be a searchable PDF file, without digital rights management (DRM) or restrictions on simultaneous use, printing, or downloading. Free MARC records and COUNTER-compliant usage statistics will also be available, according to the announcement.

Project MUSE will also offer “archival” collections, consisting of various combinations of 11,000 titles published before 2010. There will also be a subscription-based, access-only option for such archival works, which will not provide the ownership rights of other options.

Title lists are available on the Project MUSE website; there is also a beta site currently live, featuring samples from 300 ebooks from 27 publishers—a preview of the Project MUSE site due to go live in January.

In March 2011, it was announced that Project MUSE Editions and the University Press ebook Consortium (UPeC) had formed a partnership called the University Press Content Consortium—a collaboration which led to this week’s announcement. UPeC was begun in 2009 using a $125,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Thanks for the question! According to the Project MUSE announcement, the title lists now on the website are currently only partial lists of what is expected to be available. The full 14,000 titles announced are slated go live on January 1, 2012.